Sensei Madame Yao picks herself up from the pile. She points at Doi and says, “Go to the corner and stand on your hands. Stay there until I tell you.”
Doi tucks her length of waterfall hair down tightly into the back of her robe. Without a glance at any of us, she places her hands on the hard pearl and flips into a handstand.
Sensei Madame Yao straightens her back, clears her throat, and begins to sing a lecture to us in the exaggerated style of Meijing opera. The song is an instruction about how to sing clearly and how great Chiologists can hear blockage in a voice and thus can tell if what is coming from someone’s mouth is unwilling, and thus they can read human hearts and are greater than warriors of wu liu.
The lecture is somewhat interesting, but I’m watching Doi the whole time. After a quarter hour, her arms are trembling badly; the sweat is sprinkling from her brow to the pearl below.
Sensei Madame Yao finally finishes, and Suki and her entourage clap as hard as if they were trying to knock their hands off their wrists. Sensei looks at them and gives them a short nod and grunt.
I think she’s going to let Doi stand upright now, but no.
She brings out an orb formed of two halves carved of the pearl covered by a membrane of pearlsilk. She sings into the orb, clamps the two halves together, and pulls out the membrane from between the halves.
By this time, Doi’s arms are trembling as hard as if she were having a seizure. Her mouth is constricted into a circle as she tries to breathe deeply and stretch out her energy.
Sensei Madame Yao holds up the orb. She twists the two halves open. From within, the tinny sound of her singing comes out.
Doi’s arm buckles and she almost topples over, but she punches the pearl, forcing her arm straight and pushing herself back up to maintain the position. And still Sensei Madame Yao ignores her, while Suki and her entourage gleam. Hateful, vicious people!
At last, Doi topples down in a heap.
“Be quiet!” yells Suki. “You’re interrupting Sensei!”
Doi is on her knees with her legs splayed out to keep her balance, like a fat goose. Her face is so deep with color that it looks bruised. Her smoked spectacles have fallen off. Sensei Madame Yao looks at her and says, “Get up. Go sit.”
When at last this miserable class is over, I feel I should talk to Doi, but I’m not sure what to say. I’m not even sure if she was doing this for me.
When she sees me approaching, she scowls and skates away in a swirl of black robe.
She blames me for this.
So now I have made a second enemy without even trying.
And as much as Suki and Doi hate each other, I think they’re both starting to hate me more.
CHAPTER
SIX
That afternoon, I skate into one of the strangest buildings I have ever been in.
The outside is covered in words.
The inside is covered in birds.
The Hall of Literary Glory, where we shall have our first class at the Conservatory of Literature, is scrawled all over with the logograms for Silence! and Do Not Let the Birds Out! in loud, red writing.
Inside, Sensei Madame Phoenix sits behind a desk at the far end of a lofty atrium. The walls have branches sticking out of them on which sit a hundred or more green birds, the kind with the curved beaks that can talk. Most of them are resting quietly, some with their heads turned in sleep.
She keeps crossing her palms in front of her mouth. I guess that’s meant to tell us to be quiet. When the whole class has arrived in the hall, she holds up a great paper paddle with the words Do not overexcite the birds or they will swarm and might not be calmed down in time to perform the newspaper.
Suki unwraps a cake of soap and begins to whisper, “Honorable Sensei Madame—,” but the Sensei shoots her an angry stare and furiously waves another paper paddle on which is written the words Too Exciting!
Suki continues, “But, Sensei, you don’t—”
Sensei Madame Phoenix skates to Suki and slaps her on the top of the head with the paper paddle. We smother our giggles as a rustle passes through the birds.
Sensei Madame Phoenix gestures for us to take our seats at the desks arrayed in the hall. She hangs a great scroll from one of the branches sprouting from the wall. It gives us our assignment. We have to memorize an entire chapter from the Classic of Yellow Beans and then write it from memory. Since the chapter that Sensei Madame Phoenix chose for us is a table of figures recording grain tax collections from the Shinian imperial silos inventory records, half the class is soon nodding off to sleep.
Throughout the class, I think of poor Cricket going through the same thing with the cakes of soap that I forced him to take this morning. Ah, August Personage of Jade, please let the boys here in Pearl be less cruel than the girls!
After an hour has passed, the students are awakened by a horrible sound. The birds are screaming like a cyclone of howling ghosts. Sensei Madame Phoenix is skating in circles around the room with her arms in the air, and the birds are spiraling in the hall above us. “Iwi to me! It’s brushtime!” she cries. She skates straight out through the two sets of front doors, followed by Iwi, the leader of the flock, followed by a green, honking, screeching swarm.
I guess that we’re
